Angle of regard: The effect of vertical viewing angle on the perception of facial expressions

Two studies were conducted using video records of real faces and three-dimensional schematic faces to investigate the perceptual distortions introduced by viewing faces at a vertical angle and their influence on the attribution of emotional expressions and attitudes. The results indicate that faces seen from below were perceived as morepositive and lessnegative, while faces seen from above appeared morenegative and lesspositive. This effect seems to be moderated by interindividual differences in facial morphology, and perhaps by differences in dynamic aspects of expressions. The second study investigated the respective contribution of the upper half and the lower half of the face to the perceptual distortion found. In general, judges based their attributions of emotional state more on cues from the upper half of the face.     

The effects of language on judgments of universal facial expressions of emotion

Because of the close connection between culture and language, a number of writers have suggested that bilinguals will differ in their behavior because of differences in the degree of assimilation of different cultures in the same individual. We tested this notion by obtaining data from bilingual (English and Hindi) college students in India using a well-studied cross-cultural research paradigm involving emotional perception. Subjects judged universal facial expressions of emotion in two separate sessions, one conducted entirely in English, the other in Hindi. In each session, they judged which emotion was being portrayed, and how intensely. Subjects recognized anger, fear, and sadness more accurately in English than in Hindi. They also attributed greater intensity to female photos of anger when rating in Hindi, but attributed greater intensity to female photos of sadness when rating in English. These findings were discussed in relation to the theoretical connection between culture and language.     

The relationship between spontaneous facial expressions of emotion and voluntary control of facial muscles

The goal of this study was to examine whether individual differences in the intensity of facial expressions of emotion are associated with individual differences in the voluntary control of facial muscles. Fifty college students completed a facial mimicry task, and were judged on the accuracy and intensity of their facial movements. Self-reported emotional experience was measured after subjects viewed positive and negative affect-eliciting filmclips, and intensity of facial expressiveness was measured from videotapes recorded while the subjects viewed the filmclips. There were significant sex differences in both facial mimicry task performance and responses to the filmclips. Accuracy and intensity scores on the mimicry task, which were not significantly correlated with one another, were both positively correlated with the intensity of facial expressiveness in response to the filmclips, but were not associated with reported experiences.We wish to thank the Editor and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.     

Enhancing children's decoding of facial expression

A procedure for improving children's skill in decoding facial expressions of emotion was studied in this experiment. In the first phase of the study, thirty-six fifth and sixth grade children watched video segments showing facial expressions of stimulus persons experiencing happiness, sadness, or fear and tried to identify each stimulus person's emotion. Subjects assigned to the feedback condition were given the correct answer for each segment, and subjects assigned to the no feedback condition received no information. Results for the second phase of the experiment, in which subjects' decoding skills were assessed, showed that the feedback method was effective in improving general decoding abilities. Furthermore, differences between subjects in the feedback and no feedback conditions were affected by subjects' sex and the specific emotion being decoded.Portions of this study were presented at the annual meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Boston, April, 1989. This study was funded by a grant from the Marks Meadow Research Foundation, as well as through ongoing support from the National Institute of Disability and Rehabilitation Research, U.S. Department of Education, to the second author.     

Ethnic bias in the recognition of facial expressions

Ethnic bias in the recognition of facial expressions was assessed by having college students from the United States and Zambia assign emotion labels to facial expressions produced by imitation by United States and Zambian students. Bidirectional ethnic bias was revealed by the fact that Zambian raters labeled the Zambian facial expressions with less uncertainty than the U.S. facial expressions, and that U.S. raters labeled the U.S. facial expressions with less uncertainty than the Zambian facial expressions. In addition, the Facial Action Coding System was used to assess accuracy in the imitation of facial expressions. These results and the results of other analyses of recognition accuracy are reported.Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, February 1980 (Note 1).     

The role of social skills in encoding posed and spontaneous facial expressions

The purpose of this study was to determine the relationships between social skills and the abilities to express emotions intentionally and spontaneously. Students were videotaped during two tasks: a) while watching a series of emotionally arousing slides; and b) while posing emotional facial expressions. Judges viewing the videotapes determined how accurately the subjects could express emotions. Results suggested that certain social skills do underlie the ability to express emotions. Specifically, the ability to be emotionally expressive, but not ability to control emotions, is related to spontaneous sending ability. Expressive ability, coupled with role-playing skills, is related to posed sending ability. Additionally, the abilities to express emotions intentionally and spontaneously are positively related, suggesting that these two abilities involve some common, underlying social skill components.The authors would like to thank Charles Salinas for his assistance in the data collection.     

Children's understanding of emotional facial expressions and verbal labels

Preschool, kindergarten, first and second-grade children were told twelve stories describing emotion-inducing events. After each story the subjects were presented either with three emotion labels (e.g., happy, sad, surprised) or with facial expressions of three emotions. Subjects were asked to choose the label or expression appropriate for the story's main character. Data analysis showed that children's accuracy increased with age. Performance was high on both response measures but recognition of labels exceeded that of facial expressions. Some of the six emotions studied (e.g., happiness and sadness) were recognized more easily than others (surprise, fear, and anger), with disgust being correctly identified least often.The authors wish to thank the children, staff, and parents of St. Chrysostom's Day School and St. Clement's School for their generous cooperation in this study.     

The effect of verbal content on children's encoding of paralinguistic affect

This study examines the accuracy with which 6th-grade children communicate affect as a function of consistency and inconsistened between the verbal and paralinguistic channels. Accuracy was determined by comparing the level of affect that children intended to encode with ratings made by judges. Two independent variables were manipulated: (1) literal content of the child's verbal message (positive/negative), and (2) encoder's intended level of vocal intonation (extremely unfriendly, moderately unfriendly, neutral, moderately friendly, and extremely friendly). The hypothesis that paralinguistic encoding would be more accurate when literal content and intended affect are consistent (rather than inconsistent) was confirmed. The hypothesis that positive verbal/negative paralinguistic inconsistenc would bet more accurately encoded than negative verbal/positive paralinguistic inconsistency was also confirmed. Also, male children were more accurate encoders than female children.The authors appreciate the assistance of Linda B. Brideau in dealing with statistical problems in this study.The research was supported by the Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, by funds from the National Institute of Education, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (Center Contract No. NE-00-3-0065).     

Children's standards for judging their own facial expressions of emotion

This study examined three- to seven-year-old children's abilities to recognize and label their own facial expressions of emotion. Each child posed four facial expressions (Happy, Sad, Angry, and Scared) which were photographed with a Polaroid camera. The child then selected each expression from the array of his/her own photos and labeled the facial expression of each photo. In addition to children's self-evaluations, the photo set's expressive content was evaluated by a panel of adult raters. Happy was the expression easiest for children to pose; Scared was the most difficult. Abilities involved in evaluating one's own facial expression (i.e., recognizing and labeling) appear not to be acquired simultaneously with the ability to pose the expression. Not all children conformed to adult standards in evaluating their own expressions. Nearly one-fifth of the children studied exhibited evidence of an idiosyncratic expressive scheme for at least one of their facial expressions.     

A joint examination of effects of decision task type and construal level on the attraction effect

The attraction effect refers to a situation in which adding an inferior alternative to a choice set increases the share of the relatively dominating alternative. This research posits that decision task type affect the attraction effect. People usually seek justification for their decisions. In a selection (or rejection) task, they are more likely to emphasize the positive (or negative) features of each option. The addition of an asymmetrically dominated decoy to a binary set of options undoubtedly provides an extra positive feature for the dominant option, and therefore induces a greater attraction effect. Contrarily, in a rejection task condition, the decoy in the trinary set seems to be the worst option and would be eliminated first, and the remaining comparison is identical with the original binary condition. Therefore, the attraction effect may decrease. Besides, the decision task type interacts with the construal level to affect the attraction effect. Specifically, a low construal level, compared with a high construal level, dampens the attraction effect to a greater extent in a rejection task than in a selection task. Results from three experiments support the proposed hypotheses.     

The effect of the Weekly Reader on children's knowledge of current events

Analyses of data drawn from 2,331 urban and suburban elementary students ages 8 to 12 in Chicago, Houston, Boston, and San Francisco suggest that children who have higher reading levels and greater exposure to current events through communication media (television, newspapers, newsmagazines, discussions) have more knowledge and greater understanding of current events within classrooms, as measured by a 29-item current events knowledge test. Children in lower elementary classrooms (Grades 2 and 3) with the Weekly Reader periodical present appeared to have higher levels of current events knowledge, even after controlling for key classroom variables. The effect of the Weekly Reader is less for children in upper elementary classrooms (Grades 4 through 6) because they tend to receive more current events information from other communication materials.     

The time it takes to identify facial expressions: Effects of age,gender of subject,sex of sender,and type of expression

Subjects were presented with 35 mm slides of faces and required to indicate the type of expression (pleasant or unpleasant) by a switch movement. Latency and accuracy were recorded. The variables of the study were age (early or late adolescence), gender of subject, sex of sender, and type of expression. The most important results were as follows: There was no age effect when the latencies were adjusted by a covariate to take account of age-related differences in general perceptual-motor skills. There was a strong interaction in which the female pleasant slides produced substantially lower latencies than the other three combinations of sex of sender and type of expression. A weaker interaction indicated faster identification for the female sender, female subject condition than the other three combinations of sex of sender and gender of subject. Overall, the facial identification process was found to be very rapid (about a quarter of a second slower than identification of a simple geometric form) and accurate (.078 error rate).     

The effect of poverty on young children's ability to organize everyday events

How children learn to organize their daily activities and function in multiple environments is important to our understanding of development. In general, children learn to represent their world through their interaction with both social and physical environments. What happens to the child's understanding of the world when those environments are impoverished? How does an impoverished environment affect the child's ability to function in the larger society? The purpose of this article is to examine the impact of severely impoverished home environments on young children's ability to organize and represent daily routines, using temporal and casual relations.     

Learning in emotion judgments: Training and the cross-cultural understanding of facial expressions

This preliminary study presents data on training to improve the accuracy of judging facial expressions of emotion, a core component of emotional intelligence. Feedback following judgments of angry, fearful, sad, and surprised states indicated the correct answers as well as difficulty level of stimuli. Improvement was greater for emotional expressions originating from a cultural group more distant from participants’ own family background, for which feedback likely provides greater novel information. These results suggest that training via feedback can improve emotion perception skill. Thus, the current study also provides suggestive evidence for cultural learning in emotion, for which previous research has been cross-sectional and subject to selection biases. Hillary Anger Elfenbein is affiliated with Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations, University of California, Berkeley, CA. This research was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Behavioral Science Track Award for Rapid Transition 1R03MH071294-1. I thank Howard Friedman, Ursula Hess, Abigail Marsh, and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and Ken Coelho and Cindy Lau for research assistance.     

The effect of homemaker's employment status on children's time allocation in single- and two-parent families

This study compares the effect of homemaker's employment status on children's time allocation in single- and two-parent families. Specifically under investigation is the effect of living in a family in which the mother is employed professionally, employed non-professionally, or not employed outside the home on older child's time allocated to household work, school work, and recreation in single- and two-parent families. Age and sex of older children and constraints on their time, such as school attendance, are controlled for in the analysis. The data are from a California study. A two-step multiple regression procedure is used. The effect of homemaker's employment status on older child's time allocated to household work, school work, and recreation is not found to differ by family structure. Homemaker's employment status does not explain a significant amount of variance in older child's time allocation.Rosemary J. Key is Assistant Professor, Department of Consumer Economics and Housing, Cornell University, 103 Martha Van Rensselaer Hall, Ithaca, New York 14850. Her research interests include substitutability between family members' time in household production, and sequencing techniques used in household production activities. She received her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University.Margaret Mietus Sanik is Associate Professor, Department of Family Resource Management, The Ohio State University, 1787 Neil Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43210. Her research interests include time use among family members and household production. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University.     

Automated measurement of infant and mother Duchenne facial expressions in the Face-to-Face/Still-Face

Although still-face effects are well-studied, little is known about the degree to which the Face-to-Face/Still-Face (FFSF) is associated with the production of intense affective displays. Duchenne smiling expresses more intense positive affect than non-Duchenne smiling, while Duchenne cry-faces express more intense negative affect than non-Duchenne cry-faces. Forty 4-month-old infants and their mothers completed the FFSF, and key affect-indexing facial Action Units (AUs) were coded by expert Facial Action Coding System coders for the first 30 s of each FFSF episode. Computer vision software, automated facial affect recognition (AFAR), identified AUs for the entire 2-min episodes. Expert coding and AFAR produced similar infant and mother Duchenne and non-Duchenne FFSF effects, highlighting the convergent validity of automated measurement. Substantive AFAR analyses indicated that both infant Duchenne and non-Duchenne smiling declined from the FF to the SF, but only Duchenne smiling increased from the SF to the RE. In similar fashion, the magnitude of mother Duchenne smiling changes over the FFSF were 2–4 times greater than non-Duchenne smiling changes. Duchenne expressions appear to be a sensitive index of intense infant and mother affective valence that are accessible to automated measurement and may be a target for future FFSF research.     

The effect of joint control training on the acquisition and durability of a sequencing task

Gutierrez (2006) experimentally demonstrated the effects of joint control and particularly the role of response mediation in the sequencing behavior of adults using an unfamiliar language. The purpose of the current study was to replicate and extend the procedures used by Gutierrez by comparing the effects of joint control training with the effects of a prompt-and-fade procedure on the acquisition of a sequencing task. The effects of each procedure on delayed sequencing behavior were also tested. Ten undergraduate students participated in 2 experiments. The results indicated that all participants acquired the sequencing response in fewer trials and maintained accurate delayed responding when the component responses necessary for joint control were directly taught. Finally, when the self-echoic mediation component was blocked, accurate responding deteriorated in 8 of 10 participants.     

The effect of type of union on member-nonmember wage differentials

The union-nonunion wage differential can be decomposed into bargaining and membership effects. While some analysts suggest that they are not separable and that bargaining power is a function of membership density, others argue that they are separable and that the former derives from monopoly power while the latter stems from socialization. Our results support the latter view. We derive estimates of bargaining and membership effects for workers covered by national, industrial, and craft union contracts as well as for all covered workers taken together. Since industrial and craft unions differ in structure and organization, we expect differences in the socialization effects among types of unions. It is clear from our results that union membership per se in each case gives a large positive wage advantage.